Over the last three weeks, in addition to learning Japanese, I've been completing my TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificates and preparing to demonstrate my skills. Recently, I've been working on an introduction speech and an 'ice-breaker' activity. For the introduction, I initially wrote a script which I ran through with a friend called Ian. I then revised the script when I had a lesson with Satoko-san, and finally practiced with my language partner, Mikie-san. What was really awesome was Satoko-san recorded herself saying my speech, so I could listen to it over and over again. It's been a few days since I actually gave my introduction speech for real ... and for this update, I thought I'd try and re-create it ... I was better last week, but, I'm glad to say I hadn't forgotten any of it!
In addition to completing my TEFL course, I took a specialist certificate on "Teaching in Japan". This has been very beneficial as it's given me a greater understanding of Japanese culture. Saying that, I thought I'd learned a lot about Japanese culture through watching dramas; and for sure, I'd still say that I learned a lot of interesting stuff that way (even just simple things, like Japanese table manners), but what I learned on the course was the sort of stuff that is useful to know to spare me from putting my foot in it without knowing what I've done wrong. As with everything, I'm sure to make mistakes, but at least now I feel confident that I at least know I've made a mistake and continue to make new mistakes rather than repeating old ones.
Anyway, I had better crack on. I'm going to Norway for the weekend. In fact, I've just had a Japanese lesson on Skype and had great fun learning a couple of Norwegian phrases in Japanese ... as in, I pretended I was a Japanese student learning Norwegian. In the same way that I've started learning to play guitar by watching tutorials in Japanese ... I have to admit that I struggle to stick at one particular thing at a time ... but in the first five or six weeks of this challenge, I made such good progress by keeping a regular routine going. Whilst I've recently been a bit all over the place, I've maintained my Japanese learning by doing stuff in Japanese rather than in English wherever I can.
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